‘I’m sure you would.’ I tried to keep sarcasm from my voice. It wasn’t easy.
Behind the wheel of my Jeep I waved to him. He was already in his car, waiting for me. His emergency lights were still on.
I swung the Jeep around and headed back up the road. When you have a law enforcement officer following you it’s impossible to relax. Or to act natural. They can pull you over any time using any excuse they choose. They can even force you to get in the car and take you to the nearest police station. I was happy to see the highway no more than twenty yards ahead. I wasn’t even thinking of Ruskin now. I just wanted to be away from the patrolman and his flashing lights.
But the game wasn’t over. I supposed he would turn right. He was highway patrol, after all, and the greatest stretch of highway was to his right. Left would take him back to the city. But he turned left and for the first couple of hundred yards he kept his emergency lights on.
Irritation, agitation, fantasies of just tearing ass down the road ahead of him — I had to calm myself by force. And now I was back to thinking about Ruskin. What if the car that had pulled into the park entrance had been him? What if it had spooked him so much he’d no longer deal with me?
The highway patrolman took a right when we were about five minutes from town.
I needed coffee so I pulled into a Wendy’s and went through the drive-up. I had a headache. I pulled into a slot on the lot and drank my coffee. I watched the teenage couples with great envy. In memory, lying memory, everything had been so passionate back then. And not just the sex. The feelings, too. It was all like driving a car that went six hundred miles an hour and you had no way to control it. New and startling and dangerous. There were in fact fates worse than death. The girl you loved could fall in love with somebody else. I knew men who never got over their first love; still talked about it even in their forties and fifties and sixties, partly in loss and partly in confusion. Why did they cling to those memories? Why couldn’t they let go of them?
When my cell phone toned and I put it to my ear a male voice said, ‘What the hell was with the highway patrol?’
‘There’s a sign that says you can’t enter the park after ten o’clock. I guess he checks it every night. Or somebody does anyway.’
‘This is Ruskin.’
‘Yeah. I figured.’
‘We still need to talk.’
‘Where?’
‘You know where the college is?’
‘I can find it.’
‘There’s a small park on the west side of it. Twenty minutes.’ He clicked off. It was a good thing I didn’t have any objections.
I found the college and the heavily wooded park. An asphalt road twisted through it. Lights from the dorms pierced the tree tops. They were even stronger than the ornate lights used to illuminate the road here.
When I heard voices I angled around in the seat. Another young couple much like the ones I’d seen in the Wendy’s parking lot. Could anybody possibly be as happy as these laughing people were? I hoped my daughter was, and my ex-wife, for that matter. I couldn’t quite bring myself to extend that much happiness yet to my ex-wife’s new husband. I wanted him to be happy, but exultant happy I reserved for my loved ones. Maybe in a year I would outgrow my pissiness. I’d been promising myself that in general ever since ninth grade.
Headlights filled my rearview mirror. A plain blue Ford pulled into the slot furthest from me. Then a motor died. A car door opened. A man mostly in silhouette emerged from the car and started walking toward me. He was round, walked like a duck and apparently tripped over his own feet because he stumbled as if he was going to go splat on the ground.
That was when the gunshots started.
Part Three
Seventeen
There is always that millisecond between the sound of the shots and your brain responding. Most people would take cover any way they could. Throwing yourself to the ground was always an option. But for a millisecond Ruskin froze. And that was why, when he was hit, he threw his arms up and danced like a puppet until he slammed into the asphalt about ten feet from my Jeep.
By now I had my Glock out and was working my way around the edge of the Jeep. Charged with adrenaline, crazed with both fear and anger, I hoped to be able to locate the shooter. Sarah Potter had mentioned somebody was after Howard ‘Howie’ Ruskin. I was now a believer. Capturing the shooter could lead to a lot of places few people knew about.
But then another millisecond decision came to me. Ruskin started calling out for help. Shit, I thought. I had to at least see him before I went after the person who’d tried to kill him. I had to move around the back of the Jeep now and put myself in a position to be shot at whatever I did. I might as well check on Ruskin first.
From what I could judge the shots had come directly from the area behind Ruskin’s car. I had to worry about myself first. All I could do now was wait to see if there would be any more shooting before I pushed out into the open. I used my cell to call emergency and was told that somebody had reported the gunfire. I said we also needed an ambulance right away.
The shooter was gone. That was the bet I made with myself. No shooter would stay in place now that sirens could be heard.
Keeping my eyes and my Glock fixed on the point in the hardwoods where the shooter had stood, I moved carefully to Ruskin. He was impossible to miss and not only because he was rolling around on the ground. He made loud mewling sounds: fear. I couldn’t blame him.
It’s always disappointing to find that a major villain resembles a stereotypical Star Trek nerd, but that was Ruskin’s curse. Writhing on the asphalt now, clutching the arm of his tan sport coat, his three-hundred-dollar jeans properly stressed, his glasses crooked on his pudgy face, his balding head shiny with sweat, the thick two-inch heels on his black boots jutting out, he might have been suffering the shame of having been shunned by other Trekkies. At least that was the noise he made — a sort of yelping. Not the sound of someone mortally wounded.
‘You just gonna stand there, Conrad? I’m fucking dying here!’
I doubted he was fucking dying here, though there was blood on the pavement and his fingers were splotched with red from where they’d touched his arm. I hunched down and examined the wound as best I could. ‘Were you hit anywhere else?’
‘Isn’t this enough? I could die here.’
‘Not if this is your only wound.’
‘Oh, is that right, Mr Macho? What the hell do you know about it?’
I stood up. ‘They’ll take you to the ER and fix you up.’
‘I knew they were after me.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, no. I don’t tell you anything until we make a pact.’ He grimaced and rolled some more. I didn’t mean to minimize his wound. Most people would have been in shock. He was certainly in pain and he certainly had a right to be afraid. Somebody was after him and somebody was trying to kill him. ‘I’m in agony here, man.’
‘You saved your own life when you stumbled.’
‘What the hell’re you talking about?’
‘You stumbled just when the shots started.’
Apparently he wasn’t listening. ‘Where is the goddamned ambulance?’ I was sure they could hear him in the distant dorms.
A police car with siren ripping the night jerked to a stop ten feet from my Jeep and two uniformed officers, a man and woman, lurched from the car and ran toward us.
‘What happened here?’ the female officer said.
‘I’ve been shot!’ Ruskin cried. ‘What does it look like?’